Posted
by
Zonkon Monday April 30, 2007 @06:24AM
from the bread-and-circuses dept.

ramboando writes "In an article on the ZDNet site 'chief culture officer' and HR boss Stacy Savides Sullivan describes the kind of traits that she's looking for in potential Google employees. If you're thinking about applying, she also goes over what kind of questions one might be asked in an interview, Google's 'happiness survey' and the best perks that makes employees tick and stay with the company (Google ski-trips or paid paternity leave, anyone?). 'I think one of the hardest things to do is ensure that we are hiring people who possess the kind of traits that we're looking for in a Google-y employee. Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done. So, we put a lot of focus in our hiring processes when we are interviewing to try to determine first and foremost does the person have the skill set and experience potential to do the job from a background standpoint in addition to academics and credentials.'"

So they basically want a Google-y employee or, put another way, someone with the right fit factor. Does this mean that a highly qualified person, skilled and high standing in the community, but prefers to be quiet, in the dark and working alone won't make it?

I ask because my own company puts so much store in the "fit factor" that they end up hiring people with less skills than the other candidates.

Yes. If you show up to a technical job interview with a dirty t-shirt on and are rude to the receptionist because you can't "deal with people" then you may not even get the interview after all. Except in very few circumstances (academic research comes to mind), doing your job well consists mainly of solving problems for other people. If you can't get along with those people you may very well be unable or unwilling to help them solve their problems.

Someone who can learn quickly is more desirable than someone who knows Java like the back of their hand.

What would you say the balance should be, 60/40, 70/30? Can you quantify it?

I don't believe you can quantify it. The instances in which I have seen attempts at quantifying "fit factor" (think college roommate selection, most online dating services, and etc.) fail most of the time because personalities and relationships are, for the most part, dynamic. If you were to quantify it, you would probably have to do it on an individual basis. One person's technical ability may compensate for a shortcoming in personality whereas the opposite may be true for another individual. It also varies by the type of job (i.e. short-term contract versus full-time employee).

Still, I believe that "fit factor" is more important than technical competence.

I was recently interviewed by google. I had three technical interviews over the telephone, and for each of these interviews, I spoke with at least two google "recruiters" at each stage, and I would describe this process as extremely disorganized.

At one point, one of these technical interviews was canceled on a half hour notice. When I spoke to the technical interviewer the next week, there was no apology even though I had taken time off work (and I work contract, so that was money out of my pocket). I was positively astounded that any company could behave this way.

My questions about the process became a lot more pointed after this "debacle." I learned that problems with the relocation program were common, and in the end, I didn't trust these people to sell my property and move me, and the job wasn't the best fit anyway.

Some people may have great luck with google, but I would recommend that anyone look carefully before they leap. Despite my initial enthusiasm, they did not earn any special consideration from me.

Smart comments. Let me put this another way. Really good engineers/designers/analysts seem to "know" just what their clients need. EXCEPTIONAL engineers/designers/analysts work hard to DISCOVER what their clients need via TONS OF INTERVIEWS. That Requires A Lot of People Skillz.

Someone who can learn quickly is more desirable than someone who knows Java like the back of their hand.

Interestingly, having spent the past few weeks interviewing, I tend to think desirability of 'quick learners' vs. 'skilled experts' depends upon the size of the company. Small companies prefer quick learners because there are always many more tasks to do than skilled employees available to handle the tasks. In this situation, quick learners have the advantage because they can more easily grow in a company where the jobs aren't always well-defined. If it turns out that the Java guy you just hired can also manage the corporate web site, this is a real plus in a small firm. Having people who can do lots of things, and do them reasonably well, is absolutely necessary when your company is limited by the number of resources available.

At large companies though, the situation is reversed; hiring managers in large corporations are often distanced from the actual work getting done, so their 'win' is to hire the person with the best current skills. This way, hiring managers get the most 'bang' for their corporate hiring buck because the expert employee is immediately productive in the job. In addition, larger companies spend much more time managing a workforce that expands and contracts depending on the economy. Human resources are just that -- something you aquire when you need to increase production, and get rid of when you don't. Overall, it's far easier to manage a large corporate workforce when employees have very narrowly defined skill-sets that you can swap in and out depending on the needs of the company.

In a nutshell, small companies want people who can get things done, where large companies want someone who can do one job and only one job, but still do that job better than anyone else.

It's more important.My reasoning may be a little simplistic but it gos like this: If your skills are 50% below the standard for your job it means you will be worth 1/2 as much to the company. A problem which can be handled in different ways without a large financial impact. I.e. Smaller salary to match your skill level, which increases as you are trained and grow with practice.

If however you are a misfit you could drag down the performance of other people. The wrong kind of misfit can cause your best people

I ask because my own company puts so much store in the "fit factor" that they end up hiring people with less skills than the other candidates.

I've worked with guys who are reputed to be very very good at their specialty, but at the same time they tear apart the projects they work within. I'd much prefer to have people who are good but not great, than people who are great but don't fit. Obviously Google is looking for those rare individuals with the 3 magic qualities.... social skills, technical skills, and

She also doesn't mention that to Google, hiring is mathematically equivalent to Information Retrieval, except that they only care about "precision" not "recall".

What that means to lay-people is that so long as they can maintain 10,000 applications coming through per-month, false negatives (passing on a suitable applicant) do not matter because there'll be another candidate along in a minute. False positives (hiring an unsuitable applicant) are all they need to focus on. The "fit factor" is effectively the search string of traits; however, with such a large candidate pool, they can focus their "hiring algorithm" entirely on rejecting candidates where it is even slightly difficult to ascertain whether they fit or not.

So, their advertising blitz "aren't we a great place to work for" is a part of what lets them keep their hiring process easy. If they get bad PR and applications fall, then they'll need to worry about recall as well as precision.

If your goth friend is skilled and manage to write complete documentations and occasionaly answer questions, he could very well make it. I doubt however that even a computer genius can do the same amount of work than a good working team of five average engineers.

While it certainly seems like a "Free spirit" sort of place to work it's still a large megacorp (tm) which brings a lot of the downsides with it I imagine. Though the free meals/snacks does sound like a genius idea.Though after having worked for one megacorp (tm), I can honestly say I'd rather be working where I am for a smaller company. Sure I don't get free meals, but at the end of the day I'm not a drunk anymore:-) [ok I wasn't really a drunk back then either, but I did drink way too often for my comf

This is something I realized after 10+ years - smaller is better. I started out at a small shop and got my break doing everything and anything I could to help. I had to get along with 5 other people that were pretty much just like me.

Then I "moved up" for more pay to a mid size company, not bad. Pretty good actually.

Then eventually went to the largest privately owned company in the world. Benefits were great, but I was faceless. I was expected to do more work for less, but my heart wasn't in it. For some reason I couldn't help feeling used. Why? Because I felt detached from the company. Their goals were not my goals and they could have given a shit about my goals.

Maybe it was a personal issue, but at 30+ years old you simply come to a point in your life you make a decision. You either buy in and ass kissing becomes your specialty or you have a "life crisis" and try to find some sanity somewhere else. I chose the later and now work for a small company again. I don't think I'll ever go back to a large company, it just feels inhuman and unnatural.

But to each his own, some people don't have the same issues with authority that I have. More power to them.

Really? The idea of wanting to go work for someone else seems strange to me. I work in my current job to pay the bills, at the end of the day. "Culture" is just a side benefit of that. Would I work at a place I didn't like? Not if I had a choice. Would I leave my job to go work for someone because their office seemed "fun"? No.

MindSpring use to let employees bring pets. I would bring my dog in occasionally. Every once in awhile, someone would bring in their Ferret. I also had a friend that brought in a small fish tank and another one that brought in Hermit Crabs and would let them roam around her desk. Earthlink took over and all that stopped almost immediately.

One of the reasons why I prefer to telecommute. If you are really stuck on something, there is nothing better than sitting for 5-10 minutes in front of the fish tank or taking the dog for a walk. Clears brain blocks outright. And as you clearly pointed out in the office this is at the mercy of the current PHB. That is, if you have the place to accommodate them in the first place. Most of the UK does not have it. Open plan country...

When I worked at AMD I always kinda smirked at the contrasts between the IBM campus [where I was a liason] and the AMD home office [in sunnyvale where I went for meetings]. IBM had all sorts of "earth tones", waterfalls, lounge areas, and darker lighting [with personal lights in the cubicles]. AMD on the other hand was a fluorescent wasteland of equal sized cubicles and green paint on the walls. Don't get me wrong, the OUTSIDE of the buildings looked nice, but the inside was very sterile and boring.AMD w

Parent's interpretation is closer to reality than most people might want to see. Even google cannot completely eliminate bureaucracy and politics in the workplace. After all, where there is money, there will be politicians. The best it can do is minimize the chance of conflicts and the impact to productivity thereof.Of course, parent's is a rather cynical viewpoint, but that doesn't make it any less true. But some of these issues are present in many other organizations, not just Google. That's probably why

Oh how wrong. I have heard that phrase a countless number of time from every one who didn't to do well in school and just gave up and dropped out. You see, your GPA also shows how well you can get stuff done even if you are not terribly interested in it. It is not likely that everyone will enjoy Literature,Math, Biology, Psychology all at the same time, BUT if they can still get an 'A' in it that says a lot about that person's work ethic. Because in a work place not every single day and every single project

I don't care what somebody else says you're capable of - I care what you ARE capable of, and would rather put in the effort to judge for myself rather than rely on the opinion of professors who've seen only a narrow aspect of the applicant's abilities.

I am capable of building a time machine, hire me, pay be $200,000/year and in 5 years we might have a time machine and we can sell rides to people.

So would you hire me? How would you know what a new college grad is capable of? Sure they'll say they a capabl

Not that Google is breaking down my door, but I wouldn't work there just based on this article.

One of the top gripes I have with corporate culture is all the bullshit language that is employed. What is this 'Happiness Survey?' This smells of new-age rebranding. Aren't they talking about 'workplace satisfaction?' Don't most companies conduct workplace satisfaction surveys? The companies I have worked for do.

What is this Culture Czar position? You take workplace issues to HR, who coordinates with all other departments to implement the corporate workplace vision. Some companies are better at it than others, but rebranding the position doesn't make Google any better at it.

Google produces innovation based on incentive... which is basic capitalism. It's great that they want the incentives to be more than just cash, but this just feels like a while lot of cheerleading. These tactics don't strike me as being professional. It feels like more spin in an age of way-too-much-spin.

What is this Culture Czar position? It feels like more spin in an age of way-too-much-spin

Positive marketing works, people like Coke because of the brand which causes similar brain changes to drugs. A cheap way to make someone happy is nice corporate art, similarly internal company branding works. Google employees get a buzz from working in the company with the most valuable brand in the world [bbc.co.uk]. Having kooky titles like Culture Czar & Google-y reinforces the buzz about the place.

Google produces innovation based on incentive... It's great that they want the incentives to be more than just cash

People actually only need so much money, the article clearly talks about the reward of a stimulating environment that is more campus like than other employers:

Maybe, maybe not. Workplace satisfaction points towards the colour of the walls, the taste of the food... the focus "sounds" narrow. Work is where we spend about say 50% of our quality time so it is a major part of our lives. Google with its ski trips, for example, is acknowledging the blur between work & personal life. Thus with a hapiness survey they take a wider interest/responsibility than with a workplace satisfaction survey.

Personally whilst I find this blurring interesting it's also a little disturbing- many of the people I know who work at Google have an incredible personal loyalty to the firm, they socialise together, ski trips, voluntary charity events... somewhat cultlike.

Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff doneOdd for an organization that prides itself on the contrary through their bit on favoring exclusivist universities and the concepts that go with them. They would do well to take a few pages from the concept of Jante Law to have an honest effort at meeting those concepts. That includes doing away with everything that connects them to Stanford in terms of exclusivity as well, as that hasn't helped in that effort as well.

It is just possible that exclusive universities produce good people, and part of google's success is the fact that they do expects a decent degree or spectacular experience in it's stead.The "computer industry" has been so anti-degree of late it's not surprising this offends people. But, honestly, every other industry places value on a good degree, so why should we be special in this regard?

Is it just possible that the top 10% of students, after spending 4-5 years studying a field, might actually be more q

"I found your contact information on the Internet. I am interested to knowyour openness to new job opportunities and find out more about your pastwork experience."... etc

A few months ago I got a few like these (not copies of the same text). A bit spammish but with restrain. I remember being surprised and wondering how many people were getting these. I wouldn't want to relocate to another country so I never replied. I'm also not a big Google fan personally (call me paranoid). Especially the cultivated "kool-aid factor" (aka PR) ticks me off.

I have as well (a year ago). I was very tempted to reply, asking how they actually got my details.

Have they recently opened, or about to open a new office? I got mine shortly before they opened the London office, apparently they were having problems filling posts due to the very long and round-about process they had in place (involving multiple trips to the US).

Yep, I got one too - around the time they were opening the Pittsburgh (where I live) office. I'm sure they just do a keyword search on monster and other job boards (Doesn't even require a "Sophisticated" search engine like google) and contact every resume they find in the proper geographic area.

I can't be 100% certain that they just read my gmail accounts, but I was in raving paranoid mode soon after the first interview.First question was from my dim, distant past, close to the dawn of telecommunications. Nothing at all I would list on a CV that only highlights the best of my recent career. Cool, thought I, I know this because I did my thesis research in it. Now, I never finished my thesis, and never published my results because private industry came courting and I haven't mentioned this on a CV i

I have been job hunting in the US and the thing that has stuck me most is the cavalier rudness of recruiters, including those at Google.When I applied for a job in the UK my application went in at 11pm one evening and I received a phone call the next day at 9am. With US companies they never seem to bother to reply unless they want something.

Perhaps they don't realise the bad feeling this creates, but when I have gone out of the way to prepare an application, tailor my resume and cover letter and get referen

<i>Politeness in technical companies is a choice, not a requirement.</i><br><br>Politeness is a requirement in every aspect of human endevour and those who don't understand that usually sabotage their ability to get things done. Mismanaging your stakeholders is not an effective strategy for sucess.

A bit OT, but could be helpful to others applying for a job at Google:

I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago. I didn't really know what I was getting into, as I applied just for fun.

After the initial emails and phone calls, I was contacted by a local Google employee (developer) for a detailed phone interview. He wanted to ask me "some technical questions" I was told.

Great, shouldn't be a problem? I got ready for C/C++/UNIX specific questions.

He called and we did some minor chit-chat before beginning the interview. But, to my surprise, here's what he asked:

The first question:"Imagine you have two marbles and a 100-story building. You are told that the marbles will break if they are dropped from a certain floor. Figure out a way, as effectivly as possible, how high you can drop the marbles before they break. Remember, it could be the 1st floor, it could be the 99th."

Second question:"Let's say you have a computer with 2M RAM. This computer has a hard drive (with lots of free space) and a 100M file which you should sort. Let me know how you, as effectivly as possible, sort the file."

Third question:"We take the computer from the previous question and replace the hard drive with a network adapter. You have no local storage but the RAM. You will receive one million eight-digit phone numbers through a TCP stream which you shall sort in RAM. You are now allowed to send any data before all the numbers have been sorted. How would you solve this?"

Needless to say, the interview didn't go very well and ended with him saying "Well.. I've heard enough. Buh-bye."

first question: Find the density of the marble, then calculuate the... oh what do I know.

Second question: Radix sort on disk.

Third question: Binary weighted tree in memory.

BTW I hate job interviews like this. I did one for RIM (in like 2002 ish) and at one point after answering like 5 different "puzzles" I turned around and asked the interview "here are two 1024-bit numbers, multiply them quickly." To which he replied "I'm asking the questions." I just got up and left. I don't want to work somewhere where I have to sit pretty and beg all the time just to get paid. I'm sure had I taken the job with RIM I'd be one of those "middle name" people (mass murderer) types eventually. Sure I have to please my boss by finishing my work, but I certainly don't kiss ass.

Next time you have an interview like that, just stump the interviewer, see how they like pressure.:-)

In all honesty, if you don't have prior job experience and/or a portfolio of projects, they can't really tell what you're capable of anyways. High pressure interview questions do not reflect the job scenario in the slightest.

first question: Find the density of the marble, then calculuate the... oh what do I know.

Here's one possibility:

With the first marble, drop it from floor one, then ascend, doubling the floor each time. When it breaks (unless it's the first floor or the top floor), start with the second marble, working up sequentially from the last known good floor. Is that an elevator sort, or something?

The answer I see for the first question is a good ol' binary search. Throw from the 50th, if it doesn't break, throw from the 75th and so on. The other two you hit the nail in the head.

Ow. That gives you an awfully big number of tries (50 tries) in the worst case (49th floor). Going up in smaller increments (10 floors, for example) would give you a much lower maximum number of tries (19 tries).

No, doing it with divide and conquer as the gp suggest you need 7 tries. But the original problem states two marbels, so I would probably try divide n conquer with first marble till it breaks, then do a linear search for where the second one breaks (somewhat like B+ trees).

Needless to say, the interview didn't go very well and ended with him saying "Well.. I've heard enough. Buh-bye."

I actually don't see why it's "needless to say" how it went from there - did you just find the questions too wanky? (but then, I hear lots of large companies rely on even wankier questions).

The first one is annoyingly vague (what the hell does "effective" even mean in this context?), but the second two are straight out of the second chapter of any algorithms book (ie "Sorting"); from the "v

Woah! You had to answer those questions on the phone whilst he was talking to you?

Unless this is the sort of thing you've been doing before, it's unlikely you'd be able to do that - I'd have expected you'd need some time to work out the answers. I know I would, and I've been programming for 25+ years.

The first question is quite easy to answer -ish. I guess they meant 'as efficiently as possible' - not as 'effectively as possible' (in which case, as long as you got the right answer you'd meet the requirements). To get the basic concept isn't hard, but to get it "as efficiently as possible" you'd need some thought, which would be hard on the phone. (You go up in steps (eg 10 floors at a time) until the first marble breaks, then go back a step and go up one floor at a time until the second marble breaks - the "hard" bit is knowing what size steps to use for the first part to be most efficient)

BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'? Do they want the file in byte order (all the 0 bytes first, then all the 1 bytes) If so, then you could do that with 256 bytes of data RAM... Maybe they want it in BIT order - that would only need 8 bytes:) If this isn't what they want, then it would help to know WHAT you are sorting - eg a radix sort could be good here, but it might depend on the type of data

Were you allowed to ask how much memory was taken up by the OS, network stack and what programming language you were using to guess how much memory was taken up by the program?

For the 3rd question I'd have difficulty. AFAICS you'd have to use some form of compression to be able to do it (you have to hold 8M characters in 2M RAM - you could convert the phone numbers to 'real' numbers, but that'd still be 4MB in 2MB RAM). I reckon I'd be able to do it, but I'd guess it would take at least several hours to work out the nitty gritty - which sounds dumb for a phone interview.. (There's a cool way I can think of that would sort up to 10 million 7 digit numbers in 2MB RAM - but it would need 12MB to sort any number of 8 digit numbers - and this would rely on the numbers being unique, which isn't specified)

Could I offer to donate £50 from my first pay cheque to buy Google some more RAM?;)

BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'?

I think that was the whole point of these questions - get the general gist without getting bogged down in the details. In this case the reasonable assumption is that the files contains some kind of comparable records (what's most likely to happen in the real world), and the size is much larger than your RAM, so you know you have to go to disk, so you know it's some variant of radix sort.

Woah! You had to answer those questions on the phone whilst he was talking to you?

Yup, on the phone. I have 22+ years of programming on my back, and I applied for a position named "system developer". If I knew they were looking for some search engine optimizing guru, I wouldn't even bother contacting them in the first place.

BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'? Do they want the file in byte order (..)

Ah, yes. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.

IIRC, the correct answers (according to Google) were:

1st question: Start on the 14th floor. If it breaks, start with the second marble on the 1st floor and increase until it breaks. If it doesn't, go to the 14+13th floor, then 14+13+12th, etc. That gives you a maximum of 14 attempts.

2nd question: Split the file into 2M segments on disk, sort them (for example with quicksort) then use mergesort to get everything back together.

1st question: Start on the 14th floor. If it breaks, start with the second marble on the 1st floor and increase until it breaks. If it doesn't, go to the 14+13th floor, then 14+13+12th, etc. That gives you a maximum of 14 attempts.

Of course, Google would be wrong about that. You don't have to test above the floor at which terminal velocity can be reached.

Do some back of the envelope calculations, take into account that the terminal velocity of a marble-sized hailstone is 45 ft/s, and you'll estimate that terminal velocity occurs within 15 floors.

Drop it at 7, and do a linear search on either side of that depending on whether it breaks or not. That yields less than 14.

In regards to #2... Wait a second, they just want it sorted by BYTES? Wow...1) Make 256-element array2) Iterate through file, incrementing array elements to count occurrences of each byte value3) Iterate through array, outputting desired number of each value.

Google has a hiring committee. I'm not sure of the exact size but it is on the order of 6-18 people. If any one of the hiring committee rejects you then they do not offer you a job. They are more interested in stopping false negatives than they are in stopping false positives. I think false negatives are potentially as damaging as false positives. At least you can fire the false positive. The false negative may go to work for a competitor, with a bad memory of Google, and not go back onto the job market aga

"Imagine you have two marbles and a 100-story building. You are told that the marbles will break if they are dropped from a certain floor. Figure out a way, as effectivly as possible, how high you can drop the marbles before they break. Remember, it could be the 1st floor, it could be the 99th."

"Minimize maximum search time, minimize minimum search time, or minimize average search time ?";)

Second question:
"Let's say you have a computer with 2M RAM. This computer has a hard drive (with lots of free space) and a 100M file which you should sort. Let me know how you, as effectivly as possible, sort the file."

Easy. Plug a 1 GB SDRAM in that puppy. Isn't that a core part of Google's approach to scaling their search anyway (i.e., acres of commodity grey market boxes)?

I'll second this.Within the first 2 minutes of my phone interview, I was asked to solve a simple story problem that hinged on recognizing the use of a logarithm on a very large number. I told the interviewer the (correct) answer as an equation, and was immediately challenged with the most absurd question I've ever experienced in an interview: "so...how would you calculate that?"

I've never been asked to be a human calculator in an interview before, so it took a few seconds to realize that I was actually be

I've never been asked to be a human calculator in an interview before, so it took a few seconds to realize that I was actually being quizzed on my ability to do math in my head.

Nope. That wasn't a question of doing math in your head, it was a question on how to calculate a logarithm using only basic math. It's fairly simple actually in a 10-base system and trivial (requires only subtraction and bit-shifting) in 2-base, but you have no chance of figuring it out yourself if you've not heard of it before.

Stop being so literal and read the article. The point of the questions is not necessarily to get the correct answer, they are interested in your though processes.Over the years I have had more than my fair share of jobs and many of them I got even though I failed to answer the technical questions. What I did was explain my thinking, even on multiple choice tests, I write my thinking along side. You are never ever going to have to solve the marble problem, but they want to know if you have heard of things li

Great first question - and a chance for candidates to show off their knowledge of search algorithms. Do you just try dropping from the first floor and continue linearaly until you find the floor that the marble breaks? Do you do every other floor? Implement some kind of binary search or more sophisticated technique? And the fact that you only have two marbles means that you are only allowed one "Failure" of the marble drop to make a determination. I bet there are plenty of hard-core programmers that mig

1. I'm too valuable to spend time dropping marbles from buildings. Give an intern one of the marbles, and tell him to start on floor number one and work his way up. Keep the second marble as a toy on my desk.

2. Email the file to my Gmail (TM) account. Open the file as a spreadsheet in Google Docs & Speadsheets (TM). Choose "Sort" from the application menu.

3. Chew out the idiot who removed the hard drive, get it back, and reinstall it in the machine. Save TCP stream to a text file. Repeat answer #2.

The lowest maximum is 20.
The large step size being x and the smallest 1, you get a function like this:
y = x + (floors/x)
Where floors is the number of floor (duh).
If you plot this (try gnuplot) you get a minimum at 20 for 100 floors.
Fill in and solve gives you this
x^2 - 20*x +100 =0
The answer to this particular problem is 10.

"Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done."

In my experience, this translates into a dead-end grunt job.

Fairly flexable = Willing to do anything from sweep floors to fetch coffee.Adaptable = Doesn't need to be shown how to sweep floors or fetch coffee.Not focusing on titles or hierarchy = No promotions and everyone is your boss.Just gets stuff done = This would be the stuff no one else wants to do.

It just shows the difference in cultures between the USA and western Europe that paternity leave of a "couple of weeks off" can be viewed as a perk. Sadly as a Brit we are much closer to the USA than the rest of Europe (especially Scandinavia and Finland).

Passed the first stage with HR, then had the interview with one of the engineers. The guy asked the mandatory question "tell me what you do" but after two minutes cut me off as it was clear he was not interested in optimization problems in physics. It was clear from the start that we spoke "different languages" and that lunchtime was looming in Mountain View, i.e., he was in a rush. Then he asked me some test questions. For example: "Suppose I give you a phonebook and ask you for a name, how long would that take?" As you can see, the question and answer are wide open. I told him that if the book had N pages, it would take me worst case N lookups. He was not pleased and asked for a faster solution. Hence I said, OK, I throw it into a hash and then the lookup is O(1). Then he complained that there would be too much preprocessing (although I would expect google to hash things...). He wanted "something in between". Hence I said, OK, let's sort the book and then partition to the name wanted, i.e., O(log(N)). Then the guy asked what log that was. I said that it does NOT matter since, in the O-notation prefactors are irrelevant and as you might know, you can always transform a log from one base to another by just a multiplicative factor. That was not a pleasing answer and he kept asking me to what base. Eventually I told him base 2, if he really had to know, but it did not matter. I admit I did not well in the interview, but the guy at the other end did NO effort in leading a good interview. The next question was (since I do some distributed computing) if I have many clients and they want to upload data to a server, what is the best way to do that. Again waaaaay open. I said, well, the client sends a request and when the server is free it answers and gets the data. Not good. Might overwhelm the server. Of course he would not tell me what he wanted to hear so I poked around a bit to realize that he wanted that the server floods the network with a "I am free signal" and then clients can upload the data. So what about reaching the limit of the network? "Well, that is not an issue here". Aha, I thought, I see, an issue is only what the guy deems to be an issue. At that point it was noon in Mountain View and he suddenly wanted to hang up. No "do you have any other questions?" or anything that shows good manners from an interviewer. Hence I decided to stop him cold and said "I have some questions for you". You could feel how pissed he was about this -- after all lunch is looming around the corner -- and he gave me the probably shortest answers you could think. For questions which I had gathered from whitepapers published by google (and there are only FEW out there) he would always say "I cannot talk about that".

So... You really want to work there? Yes, you get lots of money, yes you get brainwashed it seems and rather arrogant after a while. Granted, this was one guy only, but letting him onto candidates which are not necessarily computer scientists. Hm... Needless to mention, Ihad a negative email the net day. Note that I did NOT apply for a job at google. One day I had an email from a HR person in mymailbox with the Subject "Hello from Google",and that's when this story started...

Actually, it seems obvious to me what the guy that interviewed you wanted to know: if you could convert what you learned in school in the real world. "Worse case scenario" (aka: O) isn't something you can blindly follow, as in many, many cases its irrelevent (thus why the 2 others). I can't talk for them, but in the place of a google engineer, I'd be MUCH more interested in "the most likely scenario" than in the worse case, since when you deal with a large amount of customers, the only thing that really matters is what happens day to day, and if the "worse case" happens, you add an extra server, be it at google, be it at your average corporation (not that simple, but you get the idea)

On top of that, google interviews are fairly known for seeing how you -react- to challenges, not your answers to them, thus the open ended questions. You could have answered all the questions wrong and they would take you anyway, if you showed your only weakness was experience, but they probably have seen too many people worrie about which sorting algorythm is the best when having to sort a 10 item dropdown menu...

Oh well, I'm sure your skillset will be more appreciated elsewhere, so no big loss to you:)

What's the big problem with open questions? A good interviewer will give you some space to show your knowledge. One way of doing that is to ask open questions and see where the interviewee goes. Real life isn't like an exam question, with nice clean solutions from section xx.y of the syllabus.

So... You really want to work there? Yes, you get lots of money, yes you get brainwashed it seems and rather arrogant after a while.

Interesting, from your story it appears he wasn't the arrogant one.

When you were describing your physics optimization, you really shouldn't expect him to want to listen more than a few minutes anyway. You say you spoke 'different languages'. Communication is a key skill, and perhaps you weren't explaining your research project in a way comprehensible to an outsider of the fie

If you're old and smart, you have no interest in perks designed to make your stay at work more comfortable and enjoyable, and you don't like people who enjoy them and stay at work for 18 hours a day. Makes us look bad. That's why we old farts run around adjusting the a/c or heat to make the place insufferable so you people will go home at a quitting time.

I have gone through interviewing at Google not a long ago, and when I reached the on-site interview stage, these guys were surprised that I didn't fill anything in the academic background section. Their forms are not even suitable for not having an academic background.So, is it true that absolutely *no* collage dropout can be considered a genius these days?The fact I've been a self taught workaholic software engineer since an early age doesn't count at all?Is it my fault for starting a career and making mon

Google has basically been approaching lots of people more or less randomly. Including me. Twice so far. I wouldn't actually mind working for a company like Google but I'm not likely to respond positively to random recruiting attemtps.

So why does it not work with people like me? Well very simple. I don't do job interviews. I get invited to discuss specific, custom job descriptions matching my CV & ambition level. We discuss the proposal and then I either accept it or not. I suspect it is like that for most people with a decent level of competence in our business. If you want to hire me, you will need to convince me that you are any good and that it is a substantial improvement over my current job.

If you are going to contact me about a job offer, it had better be specific & well aligned with my interests otherwise I'm not likely to be very enthusiastic about the whole thing. Also I prefer to not deal with HR other than discussing technical details on contracts. If you want to hire me, make sure I talk to the right person right away and don't waste my time with people not capable of telling me anything useful.

Both times I was approached by Google, the person in question hadn't read my CV (on my website); was not aware of my research career (likewise) and did not have a specific job in mind. On the contrary, the first time I talked with a Google HR person, the person projected a months long process with lots of interviews after which I should count myself lucky to be allowed an unspecified job at an unspecified location for an unspecified amount of money. Needless to say I politely declined because if they didn't have anything specific to talk about, our conversation was quite pointless & definitely over.

If you really want to work for an employer that gives great benefits you should look into education or the public sector. I work for a private university in NYC and the benefits I get are unbeatable. Sure, I don't get paid a bonus (and we don't get free food with the exception of certain kinds of meetings) but free education for the entire family, a retirement plan that requires me to put in 5% of my gross while they match 10% of my gross, up to six weeks of paid maternity/paternity leave, ability to get whatever gadget I'd like to "get my job done", and job security make it well worth it. The salary is not that bad either (a little over average for a Sr UNIX system admin in the metro area).
Anyway, the random e-mails that Google's recruiters send out are a little off-putting. Also, isn't it a little weird that when you are about to reach your fifth year of your employment with Google just when your stock options are abot to vest HR will be bothering you about how happy you are etc. etc. If you really have to try so much something is not quite right. Happiness test? Please!

I also interviewed with Google... did the 3 phone interviews, wacky questions, flying out to CA at odd hours, and ultimately got rejected. However, I think it was overall a great experience for me. I do not feel bitter about the process and in fact feel that it probably helped motivate me to become a better computer scientist. The impression that I got from its employees is that they are truly in love with computer science and I would do well for myself to take a similar approach to my craft.

In fact, I was asked soon after my Google experience to help interview a group of candidates at my current company, and I decided to take the Google approach. While there were very few people who were able to ace the battery of questions, there was an interesting effect. That is, you learn very quickly by asking those types of questions the kinds of people that YOU would want to work with. There are those people who simple brush those questions off by saying, "I don't know that... I've never needed to know that..." and there are those who try to work through the problems and seem enthusiastic about learning the solution. Which of those two would you rather interact with on a daily basis?

same here. comment to to the other responder: if HR calls you and wants you to work for them, it implies they have researched your background and have something in mind. clearly this is not the case. the approach is more a "here is a smart guy, let's get him. wait, no, we do not know what to do with him, oh well. bye".

dude, i have a phd. in fact, i am an assistant professor at a very good university. that is clearly not what they need either. you have to be very "special" to fit in. i know someone who works at google in zurich. when i see her, i understand...

Just because you have a patent in your name doesn't mean you're "brilliant." While I have no doubt Google is looking for smart and intelligent folk to work for them, being a PhD hardly seems like a sufficient requisite.

Though compared to most computer related jobs I'm sure google does a proper job of sieving out the non-hackers. just because you can script monkey C# doesn't mean you understand computer science, which is basically what google is after anyways.